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Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B

The first and smaller of the two open Qwen3.6 checkpoints, a 35B MoE with 3B active across 256 experts pairing Gated DeltaNet linear attention with sparse experts, under Apache 2.0.

Params: 35B, 3B active
Context: 262K tokens
Max output: 66K
Released: Apr 2026
License: Apache 2.0

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Hosted API price

List price via Alibaba Cloud · per 1M tokens

USD

Input: $0.38 /1M
Output: $2.25 /1M
Cheapest: $0.07 / $0.42 via EmpirioLabs AI
Hosted by: 4 providers

Hosted API pricing

How we price

Order

Providers are listed cheapest input rate first, then by output rate, a tie going to the creator's own listing. A provider that lists the model without a published rate sits at the end.

Prices

Base-tier, on-demand rates in USD per 1M tokens, converted at ECB reference rates where a provider publishes in another currency. Cached-input and batch rates show only where a provider publishes them. "Cheapest" marks the one provider with the lowest input and output pair; a tie wears no badge.

Cost

Input rate times the input tokens plus output rate times the output tokens, at the monthly volume set above the table. Cached-input, batch, long-context and reasoning-token billing are not modelled.

Transparency and funding

Affiliates: Affiliate links are marked. We may earn a commission if you click them, but commissions never affect the order.

Every provider serving Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, cheapest input first. Set your monthly volume to see what each would bill.

Input M Output M

Every provider serving Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, with its price per 1M input and output tokens and what the volume above would cost
Provider	Input /1M	Output /1M	Cached input /1M	Cost at 10M in + 2M out	Link
EmpirioLabs AI Cheapest	$0.07	$0.42	$0.04	$1.54	Visit website
Novita	$0.25	$1.49		$5.48	Visit website
Alibaba Cloud Creator	$0.38	$2.25		$8.30	Visit website
EcoHash	$0.40	$0.40	$0.20	$4.80	Visit website

Heads up: Base-tier, on-demand rates per 1M tokens; cached, batch and long-context tiers excluded. A provider may serve a shorter context or a quantized build than the creator's release. Verify before provisioning. More on how we price.

Estimated cost to self-host

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B needs about 22 GB of GPU memory at 4-bit with 32K context. The cheapest rental that fits is 2× RTX 4060 Ti at about $173 a month.

That costs the same as roughly 250M tokens a month on Alibaba Cloud's API. Self-hosting is more expensive below that volume.

Single node ≤ 8

What it costs to self-host Qwen3.6-35B-A3B at each precision: the memory it needs, the cheapest rental that holds it, that rental's month and the API volume it pays off at
Precision	Memory	Cheapest fit (32K context)(Full 262K context)	Cost /mo	Break-even vs API
4-bit INT4 / FP4	22 GB24 GB	2× RTX 4060 Ti	$173$173	250M tokens /mo250M tokens /mo
8-bit FP8 / INT8	38 GB42 GB	4× RTX 3060	$202$202	291M tokens /mo291M tokens /mo
16-bit FP16 / BF16	73 GB77 GB	8× RTX 3060	$403$403	583M tokens /mo583M tokens /mo

Estimates based on median on-demand rates for Nvidia GPUs. Memory is weights plus KV cache for one request, using FP8 KV cache where supported and FP16/BF16 otherwise. Break-even assumes a 5:1 input-to-output ratio. No guarantee of runtime support, usable performance, or that a matching quantized build exists. How we estimate costs.

Similarly priced models

The models nearest Qwen3.6-35B-A3B by blended rate, each at its own cheapest provider.

Models priced nearest Qwen3.6-35B-A3B per 1M tokens, each at its cheapest provider
Model	Blended /1M	Input /1M	Output /1M	Context	Cutoff	vs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
Qwen3-30B-A3B FP8 Alibaba Cloud	$0.0983	$0.05	$0.34	33K		−23%
Ministral 3 3B Mistral	$0.10	$0.10	$0.10	256K		−22%
GLM-5.3-Flash Z.AI	$0.1083	$0.08	$0.25	1M		−16%
GPT-5 Nano OpenAI	$0.1083	$0.05	$0.40	400K	May 2024	−16%
Qwen3.5-35B-A3B Alibaba Cloud	$0.1267	$0.06	$0.46	262K		−1%
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B This model Alibaba Cloud	$0.1283	$0.07	$0.42	262K
Gemma 3 27B Instruct Google Cloud	$0.1333	$0.10	$0.30	128K	Aug 2024	+4%
Gemma 4 26B A4B Google Cloud	$0.1333	$0.10	$0.30	256K	Jan 2025	+4%
Qwen3-32B FP8 Alibaba Cloud	$0.1333	$0.10	$0.30	33K		+4%
Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite Google Cloud	$0.15	$0.10	$0.40	1M	Jan 2025	+17%
GPT-4.1 Nano OpenAI	$0.15	$0.10	$0.40	1M	Jun 2024	+17%

USD per 1M tokens at each model's cheapest listed provider. Blended is the cost of 10M input plus 2M output tokens, spread over the 12M.

Thunder Compute

RTX A6000 from $0.35, A100 from $1.09, per GPU per hour

Billed per minute, no commitment, no minimums

One click into VS Code or Cursor, no SSH setup

See live pricing

Capabilities

What Qwen3.6-35B-A3B accepts and can do, as published by Alibaba Cloud.

Text Accepts and generates natural-language text.
Image Accepts images as input alongside text.
Video Accepts video as input.
Reasoning Thinks before it answers, always on or as a switchable mode.
Function calling Connect to external tools, APIs, and systems.
Structured output Return responses in structured formats like JSON.
Code execution Write and execute code in a sandboxed environment.
MCP Connect to services via Model Context Protocol.

Common questions

What is Qwen3.6-35B-A3B good for?

Agentic coding and text, image and video tasks on a sparse model with 3B active of 35B parameters. Apache 2.0 weights, on a single consumer GPU.

When is Qwen3.6-35B-A3B not a good fit?

Audio input or image output. There is no built-in web search, but a host or your own tool loop can add one.

What is the cheapest way to run Qwen3.6-35B-A3B?

Hosted, unless you push serious volume. Alibaba Cloud charges $0.38 in / $2.25 out per 1M tokens. The cheapest rental that fits is 2x RTX 4060 Ti at $173 a month, which costs the same as about 250M tokens a month on that API.

How does Qwen3.6-35B-A3B compare with Qwen3.5-35B-A3B?

Alibaba says Qwen3.6-35B-A3B keeps the Qwen3.5-35B-A3B layout and puts its gains into agentic coding, handling frontend work and repository-level reasoning more fluently, and adds an option to carry reasoning context across turns. Same 262K-token context and text, image and video input. Qwen3.6-35B-A3B lists at 52% more per 1M input tokens and 13% more per 1M output tokens than Qwen3.5-35B-A3B. It came out 2 months later.

Can I self-host Qwen3.6-35B-A3B?

Yes. The weights are Apache 2.0 licensed. At 4-bit it needs about 22 GB of GPU memory, which starts at roughly $173 a month on the cheapest rental that fits.